DURING WORLD WAR II, Wernher von Braun had a lot on his mind. The German rocket scientist was busy running Adolf Hitlers V-1 and V-2 programs, which sent more than 10,000 rockets into England in 1944 and 1945. But beneath Von Braun's famously exacting manner lurked a dreamer who throughout the conflict obtained a treasured subscription to Astounding Science Fiction by using a false name and a neutral mail drop in Sweden. The magazines made their way to Germany in diplomatic pouches.

When Von Braun immigrated to the United States after the war, he took to the pages of a different magazine to launch one of the most influential popular science writing series of all time. Beginning with the March 22, 1992 issue of Collier's, Von Braun sketched out his vision of a manned space program--starting with orbiting and spinning space stations, working through lunar landings, and culminating in a massive expedition to Mars. Illustrated by the great astronomical artist Chesley Bonestell, the series fired the imaginations of a generation of tech lovers; it was science fiction with all the rivets showing. Many cite it as the true beginning of the U.S. space program.

As Von Braun would put it, in an update to the old saw, "Late to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise." The Collier's campaign was his way to use science fictional ideas to advertise the future he wanted to create. And it worked: Von Braun went on to run the famous Apollo program, which put a man on the moon.

Longtime National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) physicist Al Jackson says that Von Braun, "always practical," used the Collier's series to stress the importance of "establishing a 'node' in low earth orbit and so introduced the space station. It was to be an assembly point for expeditions to the Moon and Mars, a crucial logistical concept. It's much more economic to launch from earth orbit than from a deep potential well." An orbiting station had an obvious advantage as a fuel depot and viewpoint. Plus "the rockets can be much smaller."

Although NASA has gone to the moon and built a space station, more or less as Von Braun foresaw (although in reverse order), the agency now seems in retreat. America can't even reach its own International Space Station, since the ruinously expensive space shuttle program died a long death. Shuttles were to be renewable workhorses, but they killed two crews--one on launch, one on re-entry--and never solved the core engineering problem of heating on re-entry. The program lingered too long, sustained by ever-higher costs of gold-plated, out-of-date gear. The shuttle's original obsolescence date had been 1995, and NASA stumbled through several abortive programs to develop a new large booster to get astronauts to the station, wasting billions without result.

Congress came to see NASA primarily as a jobs program, not an exploratory agency. Slowly, NASA complied with the post-Apollo vision--safety-obsessed, with few big goals for manned flight beyond low Earth orbit. Very little useful science got done in the space station. NASA never did the experiments needed to develop the technologies required for a genuine interplanetary expedition: centrifugal gravity to avoid bodily harm and a truly closed biosphere. The station was about camping in space, not living in space. In that respect it resembled the earlier Russian Mir Station, where crews were allowed a weekly vodka, cognac, and cigarette ration to pass the time.

"We had the shuttle to reach the station, and the station to give the shuttle a destination," an old NASA hand once told to me. "A school bus route writ large." NASA even tried to send a schoolteacher into space, killing her in the 1986 Challenger launch failure.

Seeing the space future through science fiction can be difficult. Much science fiction of the early era, the 1950s through the '70s, took an expansionist view. …

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